The Door to Infanticide Is Opening Wider

A Washington Post blog has announced that the editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics, Julian Savulescu, is preparing a special issue on infanticide. This follows the world-wide controversy over the JME’s February 23 article, “After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?”, by two Italian ethicists working in Australia who argued that infanticide is morally permissible.

One contribution of the special issue will be to demonstrate that infanticide is not a novel notion. Quite a number of serious bioethicists who have defended it over the past 40 years, will contribute, including Savulescu, Peter Singer, Michael Tooley, and Jeff McMahon.

However, the author of the blog post, Charles C. Camosy, of Fordham University, in New York, says that Savulecu is also inviting several well-known pro-life opponents to contribute. Camosy is one of them. Others include Robert P. George, of Princeton, and John Finnis, of Oxford.

Stay tuned! When the special issue appears, the JME will no doubt become one of the most talked-about ethics journals on the planet.

Michael Cook likes bad puns, bushwalking and black coffee. He did a BA at Harvard University in the US where it was good for networking, but moved to Sydney where it wasn’t. He also did a PhD on an obscure corner of Australian literature. He has worked as a book editor and magazine editor and has published articles in magazines and newspapers in the US, the UK and Australia.

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I heard somewhere along the way as I was growing up, that the first Christians were incrediably different from other peoples because we let all our babies live. Other cultures could decide which babies to let live, and which to chuck out in a ditch. At the time (during the 80’s, and being a youngster) that sounded sureal. Maybe we’ll being going back to those practices and once again Catholics will be a light in the darkness. Crazy Catholics! 😉

Poppiexno

If you had followed the logic you could have seen this coming years ago. The Nazis led the way not only in indiscriminately murdering all Jews but also in killing those deemed to be a drain on society. Eugenics was a popular movement here in the United States in the early part of the 20th century and Plato recommended abandoning unfit babies.
The culture of death creeps on. First abortion, then abortion based solely on sex or some other whim of the parents, and now this.
Euthanasia will be next; it’s already practiced in the Netherlands. The first phase of euthanasia will be the establishment of statistical criteria. It’s not that (at first, at least) a bureaucrat will decide whether aunt Emmie or uncle Joe can live. Aunt Emmie and uncle Joe will be evaluated as a member of a cohort. Aunt Emmie is 85 and needs a pacemaker. Statistics show that the expense of inserting a pacemaker is not “cost-effective” in prolonging her life. So aunt Emmie woun’t get her pacemaker. On the other hand, uncle Joe is 48 and needs bypass surgery. Stastics show that he has a good prognosis for another 10 to 15 years of being a taxpayer. Schedule the bypass.Thus liberals reduce human life to a commodity.

Wayne G. Fischer

Shouldn’t the publication be called the “Journal of No Medical Ethics?”

Wayner G. Fischer

Poppiexno: The use of data for what you described is called “sadistics.”